All down hill for a while

When we woke up in Banbury the boat seemed to be on a hill - literally as we were leaning over at about then degrees - someone had nicked about a foot of water out of the canal.  We never found out quite why, the lock below us hadn't been opened accidentally but we managed to get off the mud and head back towards Oxford.
I love it when a plan comes together and we reached the Village of Aynho as planned and even managed to find a mooring close to the pub, which was as good as everyone said it would be.  Sunday lunch scored a 9.5.  Once day a pub will give me a gravy boat and let me choose how much I want - then they might get a 10. Mind you the Scrumpy before the meal might have coloured our judgement.  A short trip on Monday and then Tuesday as we were in no rush followed by a slightly longer one today. It was  longer because the boat ahead was a charter boat with an Italian family on board. I'm pretty sure they were scared of submarines as they zig zagged all the way down the canal and stopped to go through the bridges which sort of slows you down.  We ended up with a queue of about five boats behind him.  We eventually moored near 'Pigeon' lock and went shopping and when we got back found a boat stranded in it with 'a broken gearbox'.  After pulling him out I offered to have a look and found that his gearbox was not actually bolted to the propshaft - all the bolts had come loose and sheared.  Luckily I had some spares and managed to bolt it all back together.  A simple job that netted me a nice bottle of red.  Is this a business opportunity??  Oxford for the weekend and then back to the Thames.

I've seen some big dogs on boats before - but a Deerhound has got to be just a bit daft.

One peculiarity of the Oxford is the number of lift bridges - most of which go from nowhere to nowhere.  Apparently many are now listed and at least most stay open.  However further on they stay down and we have to stop and open them - life's hard.